By Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director

The one thing we here at the Sierra Club frequently say when discussing clean energy is that the U.S. already has the know-how to create environmentally-friendly technologies that will help increase energy efficiency and better harness solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy. The more I read in tech magazines and tech blogs these days, the more I see that statement supported.

American ingenuity and innovation can lead the way when it comes to creating clean energy technologies that will sustain the environment. If we can have one industrial revolution — why shouldn’t there be another? Why can’t we face the challenge of global warming and helping the environment through a massive, focused increase in technology solutions?

Even those who create the technology see the importance of being more environmentally sustainable. Alexander Perera, the director of the Green Power Market Development Group at the World Resources Institute, stated as much in a recent InfoWorld blog post: "The high-tech industry is very actively looking for solutions to be more efficient and use cleaner power. Their core business is innovation, and when applied to finding solutions to scaling up deployment of renewables and efficient technologies, high-tech companies can have a very positive impact."

Those working to sustain the environment frequently tout the importance and benefits of increasing energy efficiency. The simplest, cheapest and most effective way to meet our growing energy needs is to increase our use of efficiency. By increasing efficiency we can dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed — making many new power plants unnecessary.

The technology already exists to dramatically increase energy efficiency, as many cities and counties are discovering. Cities and counties across the country are replacing traffic and streetlights with light emitting diode (LED) fixtures — which use 50% less energy. With an estimated 10 to 15 million streetlights across the U.S., the Arkansas Small Business Development Center found that there’s a $4 billion potential market for LED streetlight retrofits.

In fact, the software industry has led the way in helping consumers and businesses increase energy efficiency. In 1997, NMP Software introduced the Energy Star Billing program, which allowed utilities to give customers detailed analyses of how efficient one’s home or office was in comparison with structures of a similar size, those in the same neighborhood, and many other factors.

Now companies like GridPoint are releasing software programs to help effectively manage load on our nation’s electrical grid. The energy manager program for distribution in homes and businesses "enables utilities to efficiently manage peak periods by controlling customers’ non-essential loads and dispatching power from distributed supply technologies."

The U.S. Department of Energy distributes software programs for home and businesses owners to determine the energy efficiency of their buildings. The department’s Quick Plant Energy Profiler allows industrial clients to determine energy usage in their facilities in order to find the best places for energy and costs savings.

Our higher learning outlets are encouraging technology that sustains the environment as well. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) even sponsors a yearly competition called the Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize, which seeks out that more efficiently manage current energy resources or develop "new cleaner sources of energy." They’re now down to their 20 semi-finalists for this year’s prize, and the projects include a team working to make solar power 25% cheaper, another trying to increase the use of geothermal heat pumps, and a team increasing the efficiency of wind turbines.

Improved green technology will not just make us better as harnessing renewable energy; it will also increase our ability to manage environmental disasters. Take the dilemma of volunteers showing up after the November 2007 oil spill in San Francisco Bay very well documented by Green Wombat.

While many volunteers searched for places to be useful and cleanup organizers tried their best to put the right people in the right places, the organization of it all left much to be desired. Like Green Wombat’s Todd Woody describes it, think of how the technology can work to put people in the right place — the trained volunteers in the hardest hit spill areas and the untrained volunteers in the easier areas, and all managed by a mapping and database system accessible by handheld devices like a Palm or a Blackberry?

History demonstrates our ability to create amazing technology. Recent advancements alone show breakthroughs we perhaps once thought were out of reach. The encouragement to focus our American ingenuity on global warming, clean energy, and environmental disasters such as oil spills or water shortages should be coming from everyone — government, businesses, schools, citizens and non-profits. We should demand it.

About the Author

Carl Pope is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club.